Talking trends, hackathons and IT with Infosys

I spoke with Ashok Mysore, Vice President and Regional Head for Delivery & Operations for the Australia & NZ region.

Infosysis a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Infosys operates in 45 countries and navigates their clients through the digital transformation journey. Infosys is headquartered in Bangalore, India.

Globally the organisation turns over around US $11 billion dollars and has approximately 200,000 employees.

Infosys entered Australia and New Zealand in 1999 and the region has grown to be the second largest region for the company. Infosys has offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra and Auckland, with “near shore” innovation centres in Melbourne and Sydney.

Rather than simply bidding for software contract work, Ashok sees Infosys as a strategic partner to many tier-one firms, expertly steering their clients through their digital journey. They do this by enabling the enterprise with artificial intelligence (AI) powered core IT systems that serve up vital insights to prioritise the execution of change. They also empower the business to be digitally agile at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer satisfaction. Infosys’ always-on learning agenda drives its continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from its innovation ecosystem.

Trends

Artificial Intelligence is not a new concept – it has been around since the 1950s. However, the ability to store, retrieve and analyse massive amounts of data has enabled AI to be deployed in business applications.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a core tenet of business strategy. Moreover, broader adoption of AI is fundamentally changing every aspect of the way leaders lead – from the way they recruit and train, the way they inspire teams, the way they apply AI and human power together to achieve their vision for the company, to the way they drive innovation and compete. Almost half (45%) of IT decision makers report improved process performance from AI and 40% report productivity gains due to IT time spent on higher-value innovative work.

The concept of sensors (an integral part of Internet of Things) has also existed for many years. Manufacturing companies, particularly those in the automotive industry, have been using sensors in actual axle tests to measure fatigue on different loads applied to the axle when a vehicle is traveling over different surfaces. IoT and connectivity to Internet as well as the ability to transfer huge amounts of data on communication pipe, storage & compute, have enabled IoT to be applied successfully to analyse patterns, monitor faults, predict fault maintenance, all the way through to enabling smart homes and cities.

By 2020, it is expected that there will be 75 billion IoT devices in the world generating quintillion bytes of data. Aside from drawing insights and applying this to relevant business and user strategies, the implications of access to such large volumes of generic and sensitive data leads to a major concern around Cyber Security – another trending technology and topic of discussion today.

Data insights and digitisation of the same are important for those who embrace digital disruption. Organisations need to continuously challenge status quo, re-invent business models and evaluate customer experience to be ahead of the curve. Being digitally disruptive enables companies to realise agility at scale, energise the core of their business, re-skill employees and expand localisation. Having this digital mindset enables enterprises to accelerate their ability to innovate and bring new ideas and experiences to life.

Open Data

Open government provides an opportunity to strengthen the economy, by enabling businesses to come up with insights, solutions, frameworks and platforms, especially for major government and corporate projects across sectors such as defence, human services and immigration.

Open data provides a level playing field. For example, one doesn’t need to be an enterprise with deep pockets to use mapping. Open Street Map (OSM) can be used by any start-up to display map data that delivers unique value to users.

The real value of open data is using technologies like AI/ML and data science to unlock the unrealised potential to deliver business benefits in areas like transportation, empowering citizens and geography risk assessment.

What skills are needed if you want to get in to the IT industry?

Technology is changing faster than it has over the last many years and it has disrupted a number of industries, including the IT industry itself. Due to these rapid technological changes, access to talent or the resource pool with trending technologies is one of the key issues the industry is facing.

In such an environment, Infosys is at the forefront of the fast-changing industry because it values learning among its employees, with an organisational commitment for continuous personal and professional development.

Customers today are looking for creativity, problem solving, collaboration and quick-thinking minds to help identify and solve business problems that will help to disrupt business models in their industry.

In order to help navigate customers through their journey, the talent required falls into a broad spectrum from Design Thinking to UX/CX experience to Data Science and Insights. Infosys’ client engagements focus on transformational initiatives, leveraging an agile delivery methodology. With our deep understanding of customer core IT systems we are able to modernise them by leveraging AI and automation and integrating best-of-breed products, such as commercial and open source.

Is Agile still the way you operate for your customers?

Agile is now a mature methodology. In a waterfall model, moving past the initial conceptualisation and high-level design which occur sequentially, requires iterative development to actually get a minimum viable product (MVP) out. Today all of these cycles and decision-making processes from stakeholders leading the business and IT, are now compressed as organisations are looking to release incremental MVP functions in a four to six-week cycle.

Our clients increasingly require the ability to release new products, services and features on demand and at scale. Organisations in all sectors across Australia are re-inventing their business models to embrace an increasingly rapid digital evolution. While agile is important for IT, this also needs to be complemented with an agile organisational culture. Businesses need to foster an environment that enables change agility through new ways of working and strong leadership, breaking down organisational silos. Without a fully integrated approach, businesses may not necessarily fail, but they will not set themselves up for ultimate success.

Why sponsor GovHack?

Infosys focuses on co-creation with clients through design thinking, zero distance to the customer, culture and innovations hubs.In addition to training employees in emerging skills, Infosys also have a significant focus on teaching ‘agile ways of working’. They amplify the workforce – both human and digital – in an enthusiastic embrace of agile experimentation. For Infosys, hackathons are a key ingredient for building this experimental culture.

Hackathons create an environment where people will find inspiration. The participants meet likeminded people, share common interests and come up with new ideas and solutions. It’s a creative problem-solving environment which generates developer engagement.

Traditional enterprises talk a lot about new ways of working. Start-up culture, which work fast and fail fast, require an environment that fosters innovation and a change in mindset at the organisation level. Hackathons provide this environment which gives people license to fail. They allow one to take risks, inculcates a culture where it’s permittable to try things which are “out there” and failure is an accepted norm and viewed as a building block for success.

Written by Peter Marks for GovHack.
Peter Marks is a software developer and technology analyst.
He is a regular contributor to ABC Radio National and blogs at http://blog.marxy.org